As the British empire began to collapse after World War II and other black populations in Africa overthrew their colonial bosses, the South African whites became anxious, afraid to lose the wealth and privilege they had accumulated . Apartheid was born, and voted into law by a majority of white people -- just 60 years ago, in 1948. This was a way to keep the black majority in check -- deny them education, deny them homes except in the Homelands (like Native reservations in Canada, occupying 8% of the land area of South Africa, and not exactly prime real estate either) and townships far from cities (now the source of much traffic congestion as the black people in the townships must commute long distances to work in the white cities). The denial of higher education seems to be what is mostly now crippling South African government -- despite the "scarce skills supplement" to their pay, the few educated whites who know how the water treatment plants or the power grid works are leaving for better paid jobs abroad, and affirmative action is promoting blacks who are part of the "gap" generations lacking proper education, into positions where much damage can be done. Whites can use the resulting examples of black incompetence to justify superiority and smugly say "I told you so", but of course there is nothing innate about this superiority, those "scarce skills" would be a lot more common if the education system had been structured differently. Just wait 30 years... It seems to me that apartheid was born of the fear held by the white minority that they would be trampled by the black majority if unchecked. Basically, the understandable wish for self-preservation, often admired in other contexts, lead the whites of South Africa, and particularly the Afrikaners who eventually cemented national isolation by withdrawing from the Commonwealth, into the perverse policy of apartheid. As someone married to a German I can say that, just as the Nazis were German but individual Germans were generally not Nazis, the same applies to the kind and civilized South African white people we met individually. If a social group is threatened but still holds power, what steps do its leaders take to meet the perceived threat? And before we get too holier-than-thou up north, what would Canadian and American whites have done if the Natives were, instead of a few thousand exhausted and weakened nomadic people, a vast group numbering 10 times the white population and whose labor built the country? Did we really behave much differently anyway? Native "reservations" in Canada, USA, or Australia seem a lot like black "homelands" in South Africa, and the marginalized people in these places experience the same depressingly familiar blend of poverty, HIV, TB, violence and despair. No easy solution to these problems, and no easy way to blame apartheid on "others", for any powerful minority might act the same given the chance.

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How did apartheid end? I haven't read Nelson Mandela's "Long Walk to Freedom" (Diana has), but in brief, it seems that persistent nonviolent and violent resistance by the African National Congress (ANC), supported by the Soviet Union and encouraged by international boycotts, had a lot to do with it. Without Nelson Mandela, though, there might still have been apartheid today, and/or civil war. If you think of it, it is amazing that the whites finally allowed the massive black majority (10% vs 90% of the population) the vote and essentially their country back, without war or even that much bloodshed (hundreds rather than many thousands as in, say, Iraq). Nelson Mandela is like Russell Crowe in Gladiator, the prisoner who would be king -- after being in jail 27 years, shortly after his release he became a Nobel laureate and President. It was his civilized way, generous and without revenge or malice, and his extremely skilled and patient negotiations over decades which finally made white government officials including F W de Klerk see that the way forward was actually better by ending apartheid than continuing it. What a truly amazing man -- Abraham Lincoln of South Africa. Can you believe he is still alive and well and blessing students at graduations, revered as "Mandiba". Visiting Robben Island made Diana and I understand his impact and his greatness. As an example, he actually refused multiple offers of conditional release in the last decade of imprisonment, because he sought true freedom and a better life for his nation. Though let's not forget, unlike Gandhi, he embraced violence almost from the start as a means of resistance. This means George Bush would have called him a "terrorist" from the Axis of Evil, and look where that would have got everyone.

An interesting geopolitical tidbit -- the start of apartheid was closely tied to the fall of the British empire, and its end was closely tied to the fall of the USSR, since the ANC-vs-whites struggle was also something of a proxy war reliant on covert funds and rhetorical support from bigger Cold War players abroad. Thus we get oddities like the South African army withdrawing from Angola to avoid defeat at the hands of Cuban troops and planes! When the grand chess masters of the north tired of their South African gambits, the ANC ran out of money and weapons and the Afrikaners, crippled by worldwide sanctions, seized on this apparent weakness as a time for negotiation. Unintended byproduct of the sanctions and war: South Africans make excellent military equipment including the virtually indestructible Nyala troop transport vehicle that is now being made for Americans in Iraq and Canadians in Afghanistan.

Apartheid, with its massive segregation of blacks into crowded townships/homelands far from family and work, surely is the biggest single contributing factor behind South Africa's current massive social problems, but other factors are also at work. The violence and crime that pervade the society are probably due to the very steep slope separating the extremely wealthy from the desperately poor -- wherever this wealth gradient at its steepest, eg. in Rio de Janiero, Los Angeles or Washington DC, then violence and crime rise up like crashing surf, attempting to flatten the beach by redistributing the sand. And once the population has guns and violence is bred in, like a bear that has learned food in campgrounds is tasty, something turns nasty and you can't go back to quite the civilized peaceful society there might have been once. And of course in South Africa, a country perhaps best thought of as recently post-war, there is the possible additional justification that a common criminal is still rising up against the white oppressor.

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Health in South Africa is also in crisis, again due primarily to the inequities of apartheid and daily African life. HIV and TB are cutting the life expectancies of black South Africans to half that of their wealthy white compatriots. Why is the situation so bad, and what can be done about it? One thing to understand is the relation between TB and HIV. Tuberculosis, the "red snapper" under a microscope, is an elusive bacteria that spreads through the air (particularly in the cramped quarters that most poor people in townships live), is very hard to kill and requires a complex immune response to contain. Most people exposed to TB don't get very sick, just a flu-like illness, because the body's T-cells act with other immune cells called macrophages to identify and surround the TB bacteria in "granulomas", isolation wards within the body, often found at the apices of the lungs. If at any time your immune system weakens (stress, diabetes, old age or other illness), the TB bacteria can overwhelm the body's defences and produce severe and lethal illness, the weight loss and gradual death once called "consumption". The HIV virus, spread primarily sexually (via a lack of education, lack of rights for women who have no chance to insist on using condoms, and male promiscuity in a society which has historically separated male workers from their families for extended periods), unfortunately has its main effect on those T-cells which would otherwise be controlling TB. And since HIV takes so long (at least 7 years) to do enough damage to T-cells to cause obvious symptoms, "healthy" young men are out there spreading the disease widely amongst the women of the township. Really disturbing is the belief that if you have sex with a virgin you will be cured of HIV -- which leads directly to distressingly common child rape.